Dear Sir/Ms,
As you are hopefully aware, the dhclient-2.2.x program used by
the stable Woody installer is badly broken in that it not
properly respond (invalid DHCPREQUEST packet[?] receives
DHCPNAK) to the DHCP address offered (DHCPOFFER response to
DHCPDISCOVER) if the address has not been previously released --
which is likely to happen when adding new machines to an
existing network (i.e. virgin addresses being offered). This is
documented at
http://bugzilla.redhat.com/bugzilla/show_bug.cgi?id=73369 and is
a real PITA. I'm fairly disappointed this issue hasn't be
corrected since it is exactly the wrong kind of bug to have in
an installer, is a bug fix and hence appropriate to a stable
release branch, and makes Debian look bad. Replacing dhclient
with dhcpcd is reportedly the easy fix, assuming the bug in
dhclient hasn't been fixed in a later version. Recompiling
/sbin/dbootstrap could be avoided by making /sbin/dhclient-2.2.x
a script wrapper around the dhcpcd call and needed argument
conversion and logic changes. I am willing to try to hack up a
fix to this problem in my copious (ha ha) spare time, if lack of
interested coders is the problem. Thank you.
Sincerely,
Max Bell
meb@dimera.net